Page 24 of Kidnapped Rejected Mate
The thought makes me queasy.
But Soren just told me that he broke it off, not because he didn’t want me anymore, but because he was told to. He did it to protect me, to keep me happy.
I want you, Aurela. I want to make that completely clear. I always have, and I always will.
He wants me.
“After we get back to town,” he says, his voice low, “we can…figure out what we want to do. Deal with Xeran and everything else. But not right now. I want to do this right.”
I feel shell-shocked as he crosses the cabin, taking his jacket off the wall and shrugging it on, just like he did that first night.
“Where are you—”
He doesn’t look at me. “I can’t be in here with you. I don’t trust myself. We’ll wait for the morning and find a way down this mountain.”
My heart is in my throat. I’ve never felt so desired, and he can’t even look at me. I don’t want him to go, but there is something intoxicating about the knowledge that his lust for me is this strong.
“Okay,” I rasp, trying to swallow through the thick emotion in my throat.
With that, he nods once and turns, leaving the cabin and shutting the door quietly behind him.
***
Like it always does, that night comes back to me in my dreams in high definition. As clear as the day it first happened.
“I thought you wanted to ruin prom?” Tara turned, her eyes blazing, her blue hair a frizzy halo around her head. Silverville Lake shone behind her, more than a hundred feet directly below us, beyond the ridge.
In all the times I’d come here with Soren, it never occurred to me that someone mightfallfrom this height. Thatif a bunch of high school girls came out here, they might be emotional enough to cause an accident.
But it started to occur to me the closer Tara got to the edge.
“Thiswill ruin prom!” she promised, gesturing to a spot on the ground where she swore we could summon daemonic energy, if only she and I worked together. “This will ruin thewhole town!”
Tara kept getting closer to the ledge. When I tried to grab her, pull her back, it was like touching a live wire.
“Don’t touch me!” she shouted, and the look in her eyes was genuinely terrifying to me in that moment.
“Tara.” Before I met her, I’d wished for her—a best friend for me. Someone bold, fearless. Someone to push me outside my comfort zone and help me be something more than what I was. I’d begged for it, quietly, every night up until the day I met her.
But at that moment, out on the ridge, the only thing I wanted was for her to calm down. I wanted to go back to our meetings at school, playing around with magic. This—all this—was way too far outside my comfort zone. Too much. Too painful.
“We agreed that we were going to do this!” Tara screamed at me as though she could hear my thoughts.
Faintly, I could hear Maeve crying somewhere behind me as Tara stalked through the grass toward me, anger written all over her face.
“No!”
The word burst out of me with a sudden conviction that seemed to surprise both of us. Tara stumbled backward like ithad physically affected her, and this time, when I reached out to save her, she didn’t jerk away.
I pulled her back from the ledge, and we tumbled down together into the grass, one of her leather boots banging painfully against my shin.
“Ow,” I groaned, trying to get out from under her weight.
She pulled herself up, pushing her hair out of her face, and when she turned to look at me, I saw nothing but pure hatred in her eyes.
“This is stupid,” she hissed, her eyes straying to the spot in the earth she’d indicated earlier. “And our window is passing.”
“We can think of something else—” I started.
